Chinatowns across the nation, is very near and dear to me. Gentrification is a phenomena and more complex than Public Discourse would have us believe. We are in logan square in chicago where catalytic investments like the 606 rail to trails project forced residents to move because they cannot upkeep the increasing cost of housing and in other neighborhoods folks are leaving for a different reason because you havent seen investment in decades. If we as a city does learn from our mistakes we will continue to suffer from unintended consequences related to gentrification, inaccessible education, housing, displacement. So much to do and we are thrilled the conversation is resonating with a lot of people. As such tonights event will be shown by season and live tweeted using equity section, the hashtag for the metropolitan Planning Council asked metro planning. A short question and book signing so when that time occurs, sarah is going to walk around with the mic. Wait for her to get to you. I am happy to introduce lisa, executive director of Latin CommunityHousing Association which advances housing and human rights but parents and communities through advocacy, education, Affordable Housing, developers, and comprehensive services. She was born and raised in chicago, her family, and gentrification pushed the latino population wide. Without further a do please welcome lisette who will introduce matthew. [applause] thank you all, tonight we have the pleasure of talking to matthew schuerman. Matthew schuerman was born and raised in chicago and spent most of his life here, he is Senior Editor at w nyc radio in new york, a graduate of Harvard College with a bachelors degree in journalism at tequesta university. Thank you for coming out. What is it about . I was in hyde park last night, grew up in hyde park as a child of two social workers. People have heard jokes about a psychotherapist, a child of two social workers, and in Kitchen Table discussions, what are those words. Words like truancy, indigence, abortion, i didnt know what many of those meant. And parents told me, drilled into me and how important housing really is for their outcome. Dont let your zip code, dont let your zip code dictate one stage. And describing what it is all about. And personal security. In northwestern i was interested in covering housing, i remember covering press conferences with vincent lane. Cha sharon, the plan for transformation. It wasnt called that at the time. Growing up in chicago, cities were on the way out. That was the impression that i had. When i go to summer camp, everybody was from the suburbs. I moved to new york in 1998, i had been to a string of failing cities, new london, connecticut, the fourth largest city on the eastern seaboard with 25,000 people. 300 years later, was way down with suburbanization and deindustrialization. In germany in the early 90s, came to new york in 98. It was a thriving, exciting, expensive city and lining up in a rentstabilized apartment for the past two years. I just moved here, do you think i brought my utility subs with me . Sorry, we havent applied to this department. That reversal, i continue to report on the village voice, the new york observer. The narrative potential, these terrible underdogs to these raging victors of the urban scene, and to see all the unintended consequences in terms was really just crying out for a book, plenty of books about gentrification but it was crying out for a book that understood the pros and the cons, the tradeoffs, something that both encompassed how unexpected this urban revival was but how complex and doublesided this is. Part of the thesis of the book is gentrification is neither good nor bad but is a complicated issue. Tell us about the main points of the book. Gentrification, good or bad when i met with someone early on, is it good or bad . I dont know. I think your book would do better if you figure out which one it is. Whatever it is ten years later, still havent figured that out and became comfortable with this idea. Gentrification is comparable to gravity, rain, or wins. It is an element in our Society Today and it is that way because it is the result of this macroeconomic change where we lost manufacturing, and into a creative professional economy where people dont want to live in suburbs anymore because, white, upper middle professionals etc. Do not want to move to the suburbs anymore, they dont feel the need to live in a very nice, sparkling place with a nice lawn to have self respect. People who wants to be different, interesting connection between the growth of Silicon Valley and the computer industry in the 1960s counterculture. Apple came out of the homebrew computer club, was really into computers as a way to give people their own autonomy and greater power as we see today, what human rights activists have been able to do with the internet. This change in our economy made gentrification inevitable. Gentrification, the process by which your neighborhood goes from being poor to being rich. The median income, i go into it in a little more detail but that is what it is. The things you associate with gentrification, higher housing prices, changing racial makeup, the retail landscape really comes as a result of that demographic change. We can see gentrification is good or bad. We see results of gentrification, displacement to force people out of their home. We see Different Things available as being good. If we capture that wealth, wealthier people moving into the city we could pump that money into our city treasury which can have more money for the public. We captured a lot of what the story of logan square is. People lived in the neighborhood, raised their families and in the 70s there is movement where you have people heading to the suburbs and the city was no longer a thing. A majority community, this has been true until recently until logan square for the first time is a majority white community. What parallels do you hear . You discussed at length in your book, San Francisco or brooklyn. In the book i go through new york, brooklyn, San Francisco, especially the mission district, and chicago. In chicago i focus on the near north side, plan for transportation, the demolition of dha housing, highrise housing in the 2000s and their efforts to replace them with mixed income and in some ways every gentrification story is the same. It is the same story again and again and the characters and places change. In some ways, cha is a special case, cityowned property but you do have this scenario where it is very low income, and the encroachment of higher income neighborhoods finally gets to its boundaries and forces the city to do something about it. Someone who has grown up in chicago, i thought housing highrises were inevitable. We all knew that was what you should do. You should tear them down. Doing that, the way they did it had various unintended consequences that ended up pushing a lot of people, forcing them out of these areas into other neighborhoods that were fairly poor. It is poverty for everybody and another parallel is closer to logan square in San Francisco which a long time ago used to be irish workingclass white as those people move to the suburbs, it became latino and was a very strong, proud culture of air. In part because it was proud, special, different, really attracted young quite professionals. At first they didnt stand out. They were artists themselves, looks for an affordable place themselves. They were chased out of other neighborhoods that were more traditional. They werent wealthier than any of the other people who were there but in successive ways wider and wider. And repeated throughout the country. We were trying to go somewhere and we were not actually going somewhere. It feels more like history repeating itself. One of the things the council did some years back is they worked to establish a plan for milwaukee avenue and it resulted in the need for more Affordable Housing. The van looks like 100 units of Affordable Housing. On emmett street, what it is doing. The fight for that sounded like what i was reading in the book. Go back to Brooklyn Heights and talk about this piece of land, needs to be for profit, cant just be Affordable Housing. What we heard in the last few months, for Affordable Housing, it was a clergy person who participated in that. One of the groups that has been helping to move along the acute medical alliance. There are all these things that keep repeating themselves. What do you think are the things we should be learning from . Look at what you have studied and what you write about in the book, dont forget to learn about this thing because we make the same mistakes over and over. The hamster wheel is a great metaphor. I go back to the 1950s and i dont think people understand how gentrification has such a long history and you could go back earlier than that. One of the things we discover, gentrification a new, every neighborhood that happens here and we pretended it never happened before with nothing to build on. That is a big part of lessons learned. We cant use that excuse anymore. I dont think gentrification is good or bad, but we have to look out for displacement, people being forced to move from their apartments or homes because they cannot afford the rent anymore. It doesnt have to always happen with gentrification. Some studies suggest it doesnt happen anywhere near as much as you might think it does but still it does happen to some extent and a big lesson and the reason i did the book the way i did which is less a Public Policy book where you have a lot of studies and so on and so forth and more of a narrative that this is how it was like to live in these times, to be a city official, what it was like to be a developer, is to show how people did not think this was going to happen. They didnt think cities were going to revive. I was surprised as i was researching this book in the 1970s there was a National Movement to do something about gentrification. It was lets do something to harness its power and keep it from displacing people come of the department of housing and urban development, commission studies about it and there was a policy created, very moderate policy and shortly afterwords reagan came into office and reversed that and we got distracted by other things. Part of it is the biggest lesson, dont think it is not going to happen here. Logan square is fortunate, very clear that not only has it happened to us but it is happening here. To cooperate and fail, what have we learned and helped others learn about things we have been through. What are the best practices bridging the differences between newcomers and those who have been here longer . I hear a lot about community organizations. Journalists are skeptical of those. We have to be realistic when it comes to gentrification. There is a story in the la times about a popup coffee store with a couple of newcomers to a black neighborhood in la Holding Around their neighborhood in order to talk about gentrification and it struck me as tone deaf to have weight people invite black people to talk about gentrification like pilgrims inviting indians to thanksgiving and running them out of town. We have to be i almost think what works better than Community Conversations is coming together as a community to work on common goals so instead of lets get together to talk about gentrification and how the neighborhood is changing lets figure out what we have in common with one another. An event i went to last week in oakland with a group called east bay for everyone there was a diverse crowd being gentrified and this group is all about yes in my backyard, now in my backyard, pro density but this group was pro tennis rights, pro Affordable Housing, pro small business, antidiscrimination, pro transportation so it was a very broad organization. I could tell the black homeowner who had been there for 20 years and the white newcomer had to share a flat with three other people even though he worked at a corporation of some sort they had common cause. They wanted to increase the housing supply for one so that there would be places for everyone to live and hopefully affordable rents but were smart enough to understand we have stipulated Affordable Housing to be part of that. We have to have tenant protection. That is the best thing i would recommend but coming together as a community to talk about gentrification, what goals we have in common that we should fight to gather, so we could persuade the city, the state, the federal government to change something that will help us stay where we are. The local alderman held a meeting around emmett street, very well attended meeting, 500 people in will will local schools. One of the things to see how many people believe in favor of the project. There were those who were not. People were in favor, all just looked like me, not those who have been here for a long time and suffering at the hands of displacement but a lot of newcomers saying yes in my backyard, i am here and understand the need for this. That does resonate. Housing is not enough. And in the housing sector, we talk about the fact that Housing Starts with everything else. How does housing and the intersection of transportation and government play a role in this . I would add jobs and the most of all in a way. If you look back in history the history of gentrification people were applauding city officials and planners, this neighborhood look so much better. The people who had been there before, just moved them out and replaced them with people who have jobs. So i think one way this intersect housing, intersects with jobs. All that windowdressing and gentrification of the retail landscape, we have find ways that happened to it. We are helping create jobs for people who have been there in the longterm. That is one way of doing it. We have to work to keep Public Transportation accessible and desirable for everybody and same thing with parks. It is important to keep the parks maintained and nonexclusionary. Of famous example in San Francisco was when some of the soccer fields are so in demand you have to put them through an apps and neighborhood kids who come for a pickup game dont know about the apps and there was a conflict of the new yorker, this one group from a tech company and one group from the neighborhood came and they clashed over the soccer field and watch out for those things as well. That is what makes the street so unique and important. It will be built in a cityowned a lot almost right on top of the blue line and the blue line going straight downtown 20 minutes from here and that makes it an important intersection with that job accessibility so we absolutely understand the point of that here. I wont ask you to solve the issue but what are some policies we should be considering to resolve or slow down the negative affects that we havent already discussed . The policies. Getting back to the housing supply issue, one thing you can look at his zoning regulations and are they working in your favor to provide housing neighborhood needs or are there protection land marking protections for example that are keeping too many especially in already gentrified neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods, they tend to people there moved there because they like it and want to keep it the same and there is therefore a lot of resistance to knocking down Old Buildings to say nothing about the fact that Old Buildings are valuable and desirable and pleasant. It is one of those conundrums that i struggle with. I remember growing up, my group thought americans were philistines because we had no sense of history and didnt want to preserve anything and the early historic preservations saw themselves as antigentrification people because these developers who want to come in and build 6story buildings where the gentrified who wanted to profit off of them so it is a puzzle you have to deal with casebycase, bit by bit. Maybe you dont allow whole neighborhoods to be landmarked and preserved, only buildings to be preserved etc. Etc. So those are some things to look at, certainly the production of Affordable Housing is an important one and making sure you probably dont have this problem in chicago but in new york and San Francisco you have a task equity problem which is there are actually caps on how quickly the property taxes for property can rise and that creates a problem in gentrifying neighborhood so that if you can only increase someones property taxes for 2 a year as in San Francisco or 6 a year in new york and it is quickly gentrifying, people like bill diblasio, a 2 million roadhouse in brooklyn, and he paid less on his property on property taxes than a homeowner on Staten Island even though the home on Staten Island is one quarter as valuable as his home. And pushed up Property Values not familiar with any in equity issues in chicago and that often is the case. If you prevent taxes from being collected, you are hamstringing your ability to put public money into Affordable Housing, more accessible transit and improved transit and that kind of thing. Folks here will agree chicago has the opposite problem. We have incredibly quickly rising property taxes and in gentrifying neighborhoods that is hitting us really hard. 28 properties, 198 units of Affordable Housing, each one of those properties because they are separate sites are taxed separately. The develop into 36 units of Affordable Housing. Our second installment tax bill this year was more than we paid the entire previous year. We owe adult larger scale but mom and pop land and donors are suffering this fate. Taxes are an in